[didroe]

How do you know it's safe to redeploy? If your entire operation may be compromised, how can you trust the code hasn't been modified, that some information the attackers have doesn't present a further threat, or that flaws that allowed the attack aren't still present in your services? It's a large company so likely has a mess of microservices and outsourced development where no-one really understands parts of it. Also, if they get compromised again it would be a PR disaster.

They're probably having to audit everything, invest a lot of effort in additional hardening, and re-architect things to try and minimise the impact of any future attack. And via some bureaucratic organisational structure/outsourcing contract.

[ajb]

You literally have some of your team buy new laptops and hang out in a temporary wework to set it up on entirely new infra, air-gapped from your ongoing forensic exercise. You just need to make sure none of the people you send are dumb enough to reuse their password. You need to take the domain name, but they will be using one of the high end domain companies so that can be handled.

Bear in mind that this is a company which still sells physically and has retail and warehouse staff. All that the e-commerce side needs to do is issue orders of what skus to send to what addresses, and pause items that are out of stock. M&S is not Amazon and doesn't have that many SKUs, 5 people could probably walk round the store in a few days and photograph all of them for the new shopping site.

Sure, customers will need to make a new account or buy as a guest. But this stuff is not hard on the technical side. There is no interaction between customers like a social media site, so horizontal scaling is easy.

Now I get that there are loads of refinements that go into maximising profit, like analytics, price optimization, etc. But to get in revenue these guys don't even need to set up advertising on day one because they have customers that have been buying from them for decades. The time to set up all that stuff is when your revenue is nonzero

[prmoustache]

> M&S is not Amazon and doesn't have that many SKUs, 5 people could probably walk round the store in a few days and photograph all of them for the new shopping site.

I can't speak about M&S buy all big physical retail brand which started selling online are exactly operating as Amazon with SKUs coming from various third party entities. The offering is much bigger than what is sold at the physical shops.

[ajb]

I had the impression that M&S wasn't, but if that's the case then yeah, that would invalidate my analysis. Especially if even their retail stock goes through that route when bought online.

[Oras]

I don’t think you realise how complicated the e-commerce is for a company. You are thinking of a garage sale.

With each order:

- you need warehouse integration to keep the sync of physical to digital store. That has to happen fast or you’ll get orders with no stock.

- You need to sync the payment to whatever ancient accounting system they use, again while issuing invoices, consolidating customers … etc.

- Logistics management, where to get the order from, issuing a label, using the right fleet, making sure it is dispatched on time, arrive on time.

- Customer support, refunds, partial refunds, adding items after order … etc.

So yeah, 5 people!

[ajb]

I didn't say 5 people in total